While the news waves groan with stories about “America’s Opioid Epidemic” you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what’s behind it, namely, the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens.

I mean unspeakably literally. If you want evidence of our inability to construct a coherent story about what’s happening in this country, there it is.

I live in a corner of Flyover Red America where you can easily read these conditions on the landscape — the vacant Main Streets, especially after dark, the houses uncared for and decrepitating year by year, the derelict farms with barns falling down, harvesters rusting in the rain, and pastures overgrown with sumacs, the parasitical national chain stores like tumors at the edge of every town.

You can read it in the bodies of the people in the new town square, i.e. the Walmart: people prematurely old, fattened and sickened by bad food made to look and taste irresistible to con those sunk in despair, a deadly consolation for lives otherwise filled by empty hours, trash television, addictive computer games, and their own family melodramas concocted to give some narrative meaning to lives otherwise bereft of event or effort.

These are people who have suffered their economic and social roles in life to be stolen from them.

They do not work at things that matter. They have no prospects for a better life — and, anyway, the sheer notion of that has been reduced to absurd fantasies of Kardashian luxury, i.e. maximum comfort with no purpose other than to enable self-dramatization.

And nothing dramatizes a desperate life like a drug habit. It concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson once remarked, like waiting to be hanged.

On display in the news reports about the mystery of the opioid epidemic is America’s neurotic reliance on supposedly scientific “studies.”

Never before in history has a society studied so much and learned so little — which is what happens when you resort to scientizing things that are essentially matters of conduct. It rests on the fallacy that if you compile enough statistics about something, you can control it.

Opioid addiction is just another racket, a personal one, in a culture of racketeering that is edging toward truly epochal failure, for the simple reason that rackets are dishonest, and pervasive dishonesty is at odds with reality, and reality always has the final say.

The eerie thing about reading the landscape of despair is that you can see the ghosts of purpose and meaning in it.

Before 1970, there were at least five factories in my little town, all designed originally to run on the water power (or hydro-electric) of the Battenkill River, a tributary of the nearby Hudson.

The ruins of these enterprises are still there, the red brick walls with the roofs caved in, the twisted chain-link fence that no longer has anything to protect, the broken masonry mill-races.

The ghosts of commerce are also plainly visible in the bones of Main Street. These were businesses owned by people who lived in town, who employed other people who lived in town, who often bought and sold things grown or made in and around town.

Every level of this activity occupied people and gave purpose and meaning to their lives, even if the work associated with it was sometimes hard. Altogether, it formed a rich network of interdependence, of networked human lives and family histories.

What galls me is how casually the country accepts the forces that it has enabled to wreck these relationships. None of the news reports or “studies” done about opioid addiction will challenge or even mention the deadly logic of Walmart and operations like it that systematically destroyed local retail economies (and the lives entailed in them.)

The news media would have you believe that we still value “bargain shopping” above all other social dynamics. In the end, we don’t know what we’re talking about.

I’ve maintained for many years that it will probably require the collapse of the current arrangements for the nation to reacquire a reality-based sense of purpose and meaning. I’m kind of glad to see national chain retail failing, one less major bad thing in American life.

Trump was just a crude symptom of the sore-beset public’s longing for a new disposition of things. He’ll be swept away in the collapse of the rackets, including the real estate racket that he built his career on.

Once the collapse gets underway in earnest, starting with the most toxic racket of all, contemporary finance, there will be a lot to do.

The day may dawn in America when people are too busy to resort to opioids, and actually derive some satisfaction from the busy-ness that occupies them.

“The reality is that America has been over-stored. We have far too many retail locations, shopping centers and branches of different chains,” Clark Howard said. “But stores that are meeting your needs with low prices will continue to thrive.”

In the meantime, here’s our list of major retailers that are closing stores in 2017:

The latest news

Sears & Kmart – 150 stores and counting…

Sears Holdings isn’t finished shutting down under-performing Sears and Kmart locations quite yet.
In a news release dated April 21, the company said it has made significant progress in its restructuring program, with $700 million in annualized cost savings so far.

The initiative began earlier this year with closures of 150 non-profitable stores, which included 108 Kmart and 42 Sears locations.

Sears

bebe – 180 stores

Women’s clothing retailer Bebe Stores is shutting down all of its roughly 180 locations nationwide.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission dated April 21, the company said it expects to close all stores by the end of May after liquidation sales are held.

The retailer’s future remains unclear, though some speculate it will continue as an online-only merchant.

Rue21 – 400 stores

A message on rue21.com read, “It’s true – we are closing some stores. It was a difficult but necessary decision. But the good news is we still have hundreds of locations across the country, and our website rue21.com, open for business!”

Rue21 has posted a list of the locations that are closing on its website. Click here to see if yours is affected.

Department stores

JCPenney – 138 stores

JCPenney is delaying plans to close 138 stores because sales are up since the retailer announced that it was shutting them down.

Macy’s – 68 stores

Macy’s plans to close about 15% of its locations amid a challenging retail environment.

The retailer revealed in August 2016 that it would close 100 of its 730 stores to concentrate on better-performing locations to “elevate their status as preferred shopping destinations.”

In a January 4 news release, Macy’s announced 68 of the closures. Of the 68, three have already closed, 63 were scheduled to shut down in early 2017, and two will be closed in mid-2017.
The company plans to close approximately 30 additional stores over the next few years.

Mall stores

Abercrombie & Fitch – 60 stores

You can add Abercrombie & Fitch to the growing list of retailers that will be closing stores this year.
According to a news release, the company plans to shut down about 60 U.S. locations during fiscal 2017 as leases expire. Fortune reports that A&F will have 670 remaining stores, down from 839 just five years ago.

Guess – 60 stores

Guess is planning to pull the plug on 60 of its stores this year. CEO Victor Herrero told analysts of the decision during a Q4 earnings call on March 15. It’s expected that most of the closures will be among the flagship Guess brand stores and Marciano locations.

Guess brands operate 945 retail stores in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Some 400 of those stores are in the United States.

Crocs – 160 stores

Crocs announced in a March 1 press release that the brand will be trimming some 160 stores from its 558-store portfolio by the end of 2018.

The Limited – 250 stores

After more than 50 years in business, The Limited closed all of its nearly 250 stores across the country on January 8. The retailer indicated that its website would live on, but no merchandise is for sale.

Wet Seal – 171 stores

Bankrupt clothing store Wet Seal has shut down all of its 171 stores, according to the Wall Street Journal. A message on the retailer’s website read, ‘Thanks babe, it’s been real.’

American Apparel – 110 stores

Made in the USA clothing manufacturer American Apparel is expected to close all of its remaining 110 stores very soon.

According to a news release from January 10, Canada-based Gildan Activewear’s $88 million bid at a bankruptcy auction won the rights to American Apparel’s brand and some assets. However, retail store assets were not part of the purchase, according to Gildan.

BCBG – 120 stores

High-end women’s clothing chain BCBG is closing about 120 stores, mostly in the U.S., according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The Star Tribune reported in early February that liquidation sales have started and are expected to run eight to 10 weeks before the stores close for good.

The company’s mini-shops within Macy’s will remain open.

Other retailers

Payless ShoeSource – 400 stores

Payless ShoeSource has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will immediately close nearly 400 underperforming locations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, the company announced April 4.

“This is a difficult, but necessary, decision driven by the continued challenges of the retail environment, which will only intensify. We will build a stronger Payless for our customers, vendors and suppliers, associates, business partners and other stakeholders through this process,” W. Paul Jones, Payless chief executive officer, said in a statement.

hhgregg – 220 stores

After more than six decades, electronics retailer hhgregg is going out of business.
Liquidation sales have begun at the retailer’s 132 stores, which will close by the end of May. In March, the company announced the closure of 88 locations.
The news comes after hhgregg failed to find a buyer by its April 7 deadline.

GameStop – 150+ stores

After reporting a drop in fourth quarter sales, GameStop announced March 24 that it plans to close between 2% to 3% of its global store footprint, which means at least 150 stores.
GameStop has struggled due to weak sales of certain video games and “aggressive console promotions” from its competitors.

RadioShack – 552 stores

RadioShack has announced the closure of 552 stores after the ailing electronics retailer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for a second time in March.

Staples – 70 stores

Staples said in March that it will close 70 locations throughout North America by the end of 2017.
During a recent earnings call, Staples said same store sales in North America were down 7% during the fourth quarter of 2016. The drop in sales was blamed on lower foot traffic.Read more: Staples to shutter 70 stores in 2017

CVS – 70 stores

Back in December 2016, we first told you that CVS had plans to close 70 locations across the country in early 2017.
In late February, we began to get the first reports from local media about exactly which locations already have been or will soon be shuttered, including more than 10 stores in Illinois.Read more: New list: These CVS locations will be closing soon

Gander Mountain – 32 stores

Gander Mountain, the outdoor goods retailer, has announced it will close 32 of its 162 locations. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March.
More than 1,200 employees will be impacted by the closures. Here’s the list.

Family Christian – 240 stores

Family Christian, the biggest seller of Christian books and merchandise in the nation, announced February 23 that 240 stores in 36 states would be permanently closed.Read more: Family Christian closing all 240+ locations

The takeaway: Use those gift cards ASAP!

“If you have any gift cards in your home that are for major retailers, I want you to go and shop. I want you to use them up,’ Clark said. “And when you don’t know what to give somebody, give them a nice card and give them cash. You don’t have to worry about the store closing when you give them cash.”

Image above: Representatives of the the Waianae Neighborhood Board during public meeting. From original article.

[IP Publisher's note: Oahu has neighborhood boards that are publicly elected and have significant power, even though they are not a legislative or regulatory body. Their scale and and location are not dissimilar to the traditional ahupuaa of Hawaiian culture. After the disaster of Kauai's recent clueless update of the Kauai General Plan effort by the Planning Department, maybe we should consider neighborhood boards for more local input . Kauai has no village, town, or city level government bodies for local governance. Unfortunately, our county government has shown itself to be a place that has produced incompetent planning for the rest of the island. It offers opportunities for grifting speculative developers while providing secure jobs with benefits for those centered in Lihue overseeing our "growth". We need the communities of our island to have structured positions in governing. We recommend looking to Oahu's Neighborhood Boards as a possible means.]

Every month, Michael Eli stands up to address military officials at the Waianae Coast Neighborhood Board meeting.

When will the United States end its illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Islands? he asks.

“No comment,” Army Maj. Richard Bell always responds.

Downtown-Chinatown Neighborhood Board members have probably never heard that question, but they’re used to disputes about noise, alcohol consumption and street closures from block parties sponsored by Chinatown’s young entrepreneurial class.

They can pass resolutions supporting or opposing government action, but they don’t create policy or choose where public funds are spent. Topics discussed at board meetings include trees that need trimming, potholes that need repair and sometimes bigger issues like proposed high rise developments.

And if you think neighborhood board meetings are just platforms for people to gripe, it could be that you’ve never been to one.

“Some people feel that they just go there, bitch and complain, and nothing ever happens,” said Amanda Ybanez, a member of the Kalihi-Palama Neighborhood Board. “But if it’s done correctly and you have the right people on the board that are voted in, not only are the politicians being held accountable and doing things, but the board members make sure that there is follow-up.”

While the measure to end the board system never made it to the ballot, it prompted a discussion over how effective the boards are as platforms for democracy. Sometimes the meetings are sparsely attended, and 18 of the boards have at least one vacancy.

The elections, which occur every two years, take place online beginning Friday and continuing until May 19.

You’re really in touch with the pulse of the community going to the neighborhood boards,” said Shawn Hamamoto, executive secretary of the Neighborhood Commission Office.

Image above: Flora Obayashi, chair of the Kahaluu Neighborhood Board urges members of the Waimanalo Neighborhood Board to pass a resolution opposing aspects of a master plan for the Koolau Poko moku area. From original article.

‘You Don’t Need To Be An Expert’
Honolulu voters created the neighborhood board system in 1973 to give residents a stronger voice in issues and policies that affect them.

“The best training for a neighborhood board member is simply living in their neighborhood,” said Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, a member of the Neighborhood Commission. “You don’t need to be an expert in all the policy issues.”

The meetings provide a forum for residents to present their concerns to elected officials — if those officials show up. Some politicians send office representatives who may take an initial shot at answering questions, then return the following month with fuller responses.

Some board members say the information they get at meetings is inadequate, and that officials need to be more transparent.

In recent years, “the city has not been responsive,” said Stanford Yuen, who has served on the Downtown-Chinatown Neighborhood Board for 18 years. “They’ll give a halfway answer that’ll raise more questions … a lot of times they’ll just leave it open and walk away.”

Some officials respond to questions with highly technical language. Wilson Koike of the Waianae Coast Neighborhood Board said that’s a tactic.

“They have substitute, flowery answers which have no yes or no, and that’s the game they play,” Koike said. “We want a simple English answer, not technical, legalese answer.”

Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s office referred questions about neighborhood boards to Hamamoto, who said it may take a while for the city to thoroughly respond to inquiries and technical terms are sometimes appropriate.

“I don’t think it’s a case where the mayor’s representatives are trying to deceive,” Hamamoto said.
The boards also provide a forum for business owners, developers, nonprofits and other community organizations.

Dos Santos-Tam would like to see more small businesses get involved with the boards. While some owners might not live in the area where their business is located, he said, they may spend as much of their waking lives in the neighborhoods as residents do.

The boards are places where government agencies, businesses and residents can intersect.
“Government agencies rely heavily on what neighborhood boards say,” Hamamoto said.

If residents want a park to close at night, the Department of Parks and Recreation must get the OK from that area’s neighborhood board prior to implementation.

Last month, the Manoa Neighborhood Board meeting drew a crowd because Robert Kroning, the director of the Department of Design and Construction, attended to talk about road conditions in the valley.

While boards can’t create policy, they can wield influence through resolutions.

Over the last few months, Amy Perruso attended one board meeting after another to represent the Hawaii State Teachers Association. At each meeting, she urged board members to pass resolutions supporting Senate Bill 386, which died at the Legislature last week but would have generated more money for schools through a constitutional amendment to raise some property taxes.

Democracy if ‘Real People’ Show Up
Kakaako - Ala Moana Neighborhood Board Chairman Ryan Tam has two categories for the people who attend his board’s meetings: “real people” and “fake people.”

“Real people” are local residents who choose to participate. “Fake people” include contractors, consultants, city and state officials and their representatives, and the occasional reporters who attend because they have to.

Tam has sat through meetings where as few as two “real people” showed up. When the turnout of local residents is low, the meetings become just a conversation between board members, he said.
It can be difficult for people to commit to a meeting that might last two-plus hours on a weeknight.

Location also plays a role in turnout.

Waianae board meetings are held at the district park, a building complex that’s accessible by bus and buzzes with activity after work hours. The April board meeting drew more than 30 people.

Down a windy road with no street lights, the Waimanalo Neighborhood Board meeting at the National Guard Training Auditorium on the grounds of Bellows Air Force Station isn’t easily accessible for those without a car. Less than 10 people showed up for last month’s meeting.

Some boards struggle to retain members and attract young people. Forty percent of board members serving two-year terms in the 2014-2015 period were 64 or older. Only 6 percent were 18 to 30 years old, according to Neighborhood Commission data.

Boards have a minimum of nine members and a maximum of 19. The number is determined by a district’s population and geography.

As the current terms come to a close, some have as few as six members while others have all 19. As the first board ever created, Mililani/Waipiu/Melemanu board has an exception that allows it to have 23 members.

Hamamoto links low participation on neighborhood boards with Hawaii’s record low voter turnout. He and his staff of 13 people have made it their mission to reach out to the nearly 1 million people who live on Oahu.

They’ve visited more than 1,000 establishments islandwide to inform people about the boards, including doctors offices, golf courses, service clubs and cultural festivals.

“We’re boots on the ground,” Hamamoto said.

Elections begin Friday. They are conducted online and are open to all registered voters on Oahu. Mail-in ballots are also available, but require voters to call the ballot request hotline at 768-3763, with more directions at the city’s website.

Political Launching Pad

Sen. Karl Rhoads spent 10 years on the Downtown-Chinatown Neighborhood Board before becoming a state representative. He’s now a state senator.

“It was neat to see him work his way up through the ranks,” said Hamamoto, a former member of the Downtown Neighborhood Board.

Dos Santos-Tam has similar sentiments about Rep. Takashi Ohno and Rep. Kaniela Ing, now a Maui leggislator, both of whom served alongside him on the Liliha Neighborhood Board.

Rhoads, Sen. Laura Theilen, Rep. Tom Brower, and City Councilman Brandon Elefante are among the elected officials who started their political careers on a neighborhood board.

Mayor Caldwell served on both the Kaimuki and Manoa neighborhood boards.

Marcus Paaluhi, now the chair of the Waianae Coast Neighborhood Board, ran for the state House last year but lost to Rep. Cedric Gates, who also once served as the chair of the board.

A record number of Oahu residents have cast their vote for the 2015 Neighborhood Board election, according to the Honolulu Neighborhood Commission Office.

With a day still left before the ballot closes, nearly 18,500 people have already voted in the all-online election, surpassing the previous record set during the last election in 2013 by nearly 20 percent.

This year, 598 candidates are vying for 437 seats in the biennial, all-online election, which received an innovation award from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for cutting costs by switching to a digital format.

Any Oahu residents who were registered to vote in the 2014 elections or newly signed up with the Neighborhood Commission can still cast their votes until 11:59 p.m. on Friday.

Oahu’s Neighborhood Boards serve as advisory councils that help decide what happens in their community in terms of development, business and neighborhood laws at all levels of government.

Image above: "Around the country, people are saying that we've had enough of Wells Fargo really doing everything it can to extract as much value out of our communities as possible, and we're fighting back," Saqib Bhatti, director of the ReFund America Project who also is working on the Forgo Wells campaign. From (ForgoWells.org).

The board of directors of Wells Fargo Bank was dealt low-confidence vote, and met with fierce protests in and outside of annual shareholder meeting.

Met by fierce protests both inside and out the annual shareholder meeting in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida on Tuesday, members of the Wells Fargo board of directors refused to step down despite expressions of outrage and no confidence for their handling of a massive consumer banking scam.

The meeting marked the first for shareholders since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) last September exposed the bank for opening millions of unauthorized accounts, which saddled many customers with fees and blemishes on their credit score, all in the name of meeting unrealistic sales quotas.

The massive scandal and fallout led to the resignation of former CEO John Stumpf and Tuesday's meeting was expected to be the moment that the directors would be held to account.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) issued a series of tweets during the three-hour long meeting, advising those voting to demand accountability:

Either @WellsFargo’s board failed to fully investigate the fraud for years or they knew about it and did nothing – either is unacceptable.

During the first minutes of the meeting, shareholder Bruce Marks of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America spurred mayhem as he demanded that board members to stand up and tell investors what they knew and when they knew it about the scandal [...]

"Let them speak! Let them speak! Or are they just mouthpieces for the executives who allowed these predatory practices to occur?" Marks said. [Chairman Stephen] Sanger tried to get Marks to sit down and wait until a specific Q&A session, telling him he was "out of order." [...]

"Wells Fargo has been out of order for years, and your response is, 'Well, we're sorry,'" Marks yelled. "Well, that's not good enough!"

Sister Nora Nash, director of corporate responsibility for the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, also denounced the board, saying they "failed to set the tone and the culture" that it should have, according toNBC News.

At one point, shareholders introduced a motion to break up the banking giant. Rachel Curley, democracy associate with the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said of the request:

"One of the key arguments for reducing the size of Wells Fargo... is that the bank is too big to manage. The massive cross-selling fraud attests to this problem."

Another proposal which recommended the bank drop its funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) was also tabled. "You can drink water. You can't drink oil," Robert Taken Alive, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council, said during the meeting. "We're looking for action. We're not looking for policy or paper."

Outside the meeting, campaigners held a day of action to draw attention to the "corrupt and unethical business practices" of the bank—from an overnight anti-pipeline protest at a New York City location to a flyover banner above the Florida meeting, which drew attention to Wells Fargo executive Jeff Grubb's support for an anti-LGBT extremist group. Others took to Twitter to express their outrage with the banking giant, using the hashtag #ForgoWells.

"Around the country, people are saying that we've had enough of Wells Fargo really doing everything it can to extract as much value out of our communities as possible, and we're fighting back," Saqib Bhatti, director of the ReFund America Project who also is working on the Forgo Wells campaign, toldCounterSpin recently, explaining that the campaign "is really about getting cities, states, counties, school districts across the country to stop doing business with Wells Fargo."

In addition to the day of action, Forgo Wells is circulating a petition that, Bhatti explained, "calls on the bank to divest from Dakota Access Pipeline, to stop investing in private prisons and immigration detention centers, to stop funding the payday lending industry, to stop its tremendous lobbying that it's doing to try to influence our politics, to stop its predatory foreclosure practices, and a number of other demands that we raise."

Ultimately, "all but three of the directors received less than 81 percent of the shares cast, with risk committee chairman Enrique Hernandez Jr. receiving the lowest tally, 53 percent," reported Deon Roberts and Rick Rothacker with the Charlotte Observer's "Bank Watch," who described the vote as "a strong rebuke."

"It's extremely rare for corporate directors to be voted out or even to have a poor showing in annual shareholder votes," they noted. "Running unopposed, they typically receive voting percentages in the high 90s." Chairman Sanger only received 56 percent. The three directors who fared well were all hired in the wake of the scandal.

The embattled board seemed to hold on with the help of Warren Buffett, whose company Berkshire Hathaway owns about 10 percent of shares.

Image above: We at IslandBreath have attempted to do permaculture. Photo from our backyard efforts at creating a "food forest" that we have named "Akea Aina". In this image are cacao, starfruit, avocado, papaya, cassava, coconut, breadfruit, banana, and mango. Photo by Juan Wilson.

Akea Aina consists of about 1.5 acres of land - a third of it is our property, a third rented from the Robinson family and another third is on Hawaiian public land.

The photo above show haole koa ("false" koa) trees in foreground. They are early adopters in yards on Hanapepe Valley but few people have let haole koa grow so large as they are usually considered weed trees.

Haole koa are hard and heavy wood good for fires and they are good nitrogen fixers. They provide light shade that sun-delicate plants can grow under. Beneath them are a row of cacao trees with fruit.

To the left and right of this photo are breadfruit trees and cassava. Beyond what you can see are beehives.

In the background, from the left is a starfruit tree, coconut, mango, papaya, avocado and more. That's only a small sample of what can be grown on a small farm.

Below is a brief video survey of permaculture efforts in Hawaii on various islands. By "permaculture" we mean intentional living arrangements on land that produces food and fertile land as a foundation of healthy local flora and fauna. This way of life means living "in nature".

That implies sustainable self sufficiency in food, soil, water and energy.

Mokupuni o Hawaii
Introduction to the permaculture training programs offered at the La'akea community on the Big Island, with teacher Tracy Matfin. Get a look at La'akea uses permaculture principles.

Image above: Photo detail of can of Dow Chemical's chlorpyrifos pesticide distributed by David Gray Co. with warning: "This product is too hazardous for use by householders. Householders must not use this product in or around the home." From (http://www.fertilisersdirect.com.au/pco-chlorpyrifos-1l.html).

The hits to our food, farms, and environment just keep coming.
Just hours ago, President Trump signed a new Executive Order, this time specifically on agriculture, directing the Secretary of Agriculture to undertake a 180-day review to “identify and eliminate" what Trump says are "unnecessary regulations”.1

The Presidential Order also creates a new task force to recommend eliminating food and agriculture legislation, policies, and regulations that might hinder the profit-making of “agribusiness.”

What kind of regulations are they looking at? Well, the details are slim, but what is there doesn’t look good. We know that regulations regarding the oversight, production, and export of genetically engineered crops are high on the list.2

The Executive Order also seems to push for faster and/or easier approvals for pesticides and biotech crops, pushing biotech crops abroad to ease export market access, easing the privatization of scarce public water resources for corporate gain, and opening public lands up to mining, farming, ranching and other activities that don’t belong on our public lands.3

We know that Agribusiness has Trump’s ear. He picked Sonny Perdue, one of Big Ag’s own, for his USDA Secretary.

And this week, the Associated Press dropped a bombshell:

Dow Chemical gave $1,000,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund, and the chemical giant is now urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set aside its findings on chlorpyrifos and three other pesticides that federal scientists from several agencies found were harmful to endangered species and human health.4

Trump’s EPA also just green-lighted Dow’s new “Enlist Duo” genetically engineered crops, resistant to 2,4-D, part of the Vietnam Era Agent Orange pesticide.

In January, then President-elect Trump sat down chemical giant Bayer’s CEO Werner Baumann and Monsanto’s CEO Hugh Grant at Trump Tower and had a “productive meeting” on “the future of the agriculture industry” and the pending merger between the two companies.

Combined, President Trump, EPA Administrator Pruitt, and newly confirmed USDA Secretary Perdue have received millions of dollars from Big Ag and chemical companies.

We can’t allow the protections we depend on for clean water, clean air, and safe food to be gutted by the new administration and the corporations which have purchased great influence over the President and his policies.

The EU joined the pushback. Miguel Árias Cañete, the EU’s climate action commissioner, said: “The continued leadership of the EU, China and many other major economies is now more important than ever. When it comes to climate and the global clean energy transition, there cannot be vacuums, there can only be drivers, and we are committed to driving this agenda forward.”

Fine sentiments. But whereas China can point to policies consistent with its rhetoric, unfortunately the same cannot be said of much EU national policymaking, as things stand.

Among EU states, only Sweden, Germany and France are pursuing goals consistent with the Paris target of 40% cuts in carbon emissions by 2030, according to a study by Carbon Market Watch.

As ever, much will depend on industry, and one encouraging development this month was a pledge by Eurelectric, a trade body which represents 3,500 utilities with a combined value of over €200 billion, vowing no new investments in coal plants after 2020. Among the 28 EU countries, only Polish and Greek companies did not join the initiative.

Solar in California exceeded 50% of supply, for the first time ever, causing a net market oversupply resulting in a short interval of negative wholesale prices.

Costs of renewables keep falling. GTM Research predicts that solar will drop below two cents per kilowatt hour in 2017. Offshore wind is the latest renewable to defy predictions. EnBW and Dong won offshore wind tenders in the North Sea with the first subsidy-free bids.

Moody’s reported that wind is now cheaper to install new than coal is to operate in 58 power plants across 15 Midwestern states, at $20 a megawatt versus $30. Trump told a rally in Kentucky that “the miners are coming back”. But they aren’t. Not even top US coal boss Robert Murray expects that, in the face of real contemporary economics.

As for US renewables companies, they were professing this month that their industries will thrive even without the Clean Power Plan. Their confidence is rooted in record solar installation and above average wind installation in 2016, plus federally agreed tax credits that would be difficult for the Trump administration to dismantle.

The news was also broadly good for EVs this month, with Tesla meeting production targets and its shares soaring to an all time high, for a while making it the most valuable car company in America. Meanwhile Big Oil, facing predictions of significant demand destruction by EVs within just years, is struggling to break even.

The oil industry loves to taunt its critics with the mantra that “peak oil is dead”. For some players, it is clearly not the case. Mexico’s proved oil reserves have declined by more than a third since 2013.

This month its National Hydrocarbons Commission country warned that the country will run out of oil in less than nine years if there are no new discoveries.

What an incentive fast oil depletion like that must be to build a clean-energy economy fast, never mind climate change. (More on this in my keynote to the MIREC renewables congress in Mexico City on 10th May).

And there are many other stand-out non-climate incentives around our troubled world, from air pollution to risk of stranded assets. But new figures showed that clean energy investment dropped 17% in the first quarter of 2017.

3. Tech for Good? Evidence of effort
Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics outpace even those in clean energy, and continue to be used in many ways for the betterment of society. But evidence that they have profound downsides was everywhere this month.

YouTube and Google’s use of algorithms to automatically match ads with content is the basis for widespread criticism that they fed the spread of fake news in the crucial months running up to both the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, much of it orchestrated by a well organised nationalist-right dark-propaganda network.

The two companies ran into further, related, trouble, with big name advertisers boycotting them for posting ads next to racist and other offensive content. The boycotters included such diverse actors as AT&T, the BBC, the British government, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Verizon, and WalMart.

They might want to hurry. The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, argues that concentration of power over information, such as Goggle and Facebook now possess, is dangerous for society. He is plotting, with others in the Decentralized Information Group at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL), means to decentralise control of data in his creation.

The threat AI and robotics pose to jobs becomes ever clearer. More than 10 million UK workers are at risk of being replaced within 15 years, PwC calculated, some 30% of the workforce. The IPPR estimates a similar figure: robots replacing 1 in 3 UK jobs over the next 20 years.

A report by the US National Bureau of Economic Research goes further, suggesting that large numbers of jobs have already been lost to robotics in America, and are unlikely to come back. Wages have been depressed in the process, they contend.

The question arises, then, as to how much this has been fueling populist rage, on both sides of the Atlantic, making it easier for nationalist demagogues to push their argument that “the other” – immigrants and anyone else who is not in what psychologists call their in-group – is entirely to blame.

Whatever the answer to that question about the past, the additional stress just around the corner will clearly pose a dire threat to social cohesion if nothing is done. The imperative for government and business to act is obvious.

4. Truth Liars under growing scrutiny
As investigations into the conduct of the Trump election and the Brexit vote continue, it becomes ever clearer that the nationalist right is capable of extraordinary feats of voter manipulation.

A group of UK academics warned this month that dark money is a threat to the integrity of British elections. The Electoral Commission is investigating whether work by Cambridge Analytica, one data firm at the heart of the controversy, constitutes an undeclared donation from an impermissible foreign donor.

Cambridge Analytica is majority owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major bankroller of Donald Trump. Steve Bannon, Trump’s head of strategy, has been a major player in the development of the company and its capabilities.

Filings of White House staffers’ interests this month show he has made millions shaping right-wing thought, via Cambridge Analytica and other organs.
The pushback unfolding against this fast-emerging Orwellian narrative is often extraordinary to behold.

The Los Angeles Times published a series of essays by its editorial board this month. “Our Dishonest President”, the first was entitled. “Why Trump lies”, the second. They read like a science fiction novel of a dystopian future society. But they are about real-life America, today.

New arenas of corporate responsibility are being stimulated, unsurprisingly. Google announced it will begin to display fact-checking labels to show if news it purveys is true or false. Facebook gave a green light to its employees to protest against Trump on May 1st. Dramas build slowly in the courts as truth and lies compete. A judge rejected Trump’s defense against a claim he incited violence at one of his rallies.

5. Equality Talk of cutting aid as famine rages
Meanwhile, though you would hardly know it from mainstream media coverage, we are in the midst of the gravest humanitarian crisis since 1945 – since the creation of the United Nations. 20 million people face starvation and famine in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria, the UN warns.

In SolarAid, my colleagues and I could not agree more. Our work is based on the fact that if you burn oil in a kerosene lamp in Africa and it will cost you almost $80 a year, yet a solar lamp retailing at around $5 will give clean light for free, for 4 years.

So if you were one of the poorest people in Africa, which would you rather do? Save $70 a year to spend on food and other essentials, in a time of famine, or burn a fistful of ten dollar bills each year, and risk your health breathing the fumes? This should be an obvious starting point for a massive programme to free up local money for the necessities of poverty alleviation, SolarAid contends.

But sales of the most affordable of these lights are actually falling in Africa, and in fact the rest of the world too. In Malawi, for example, we are one of only a few organisations working to help. More on that subject, a microcosm of global challenges and opportunities in energy, in an e-mail in a week or so.

6. Reform of Capitalism Graphic evidence of the need
The Bank of England has admitted to fearing, in the current febrile financial climate, that it may not be able to spot the next global crisis coming. Few who studied the forensics of the last one, and the response – or mostly lack thereof – can be surprised. There are obvious candidates for a trigger in the inflated stock market, and mountainous debt in car loans, credit cards, and mortgages. The Brexit gamble is also potentially on the list. The IMF professes that its unpredictable outcome poses a risk to global stability.

Given the fact that regulators regard another crisis as inevitable, and see an unreadable multiplicity of potential paths to it, who can realistically contend that the unbridled 21st century version of capitalism is anything close to a satisfactory way to run a global economy today?

Root-to-branch reform might take some mapping, but starting points are not too difficult to find. One involves the jailing of executives guilty of gross corruption. Until this starts happening, how there can be hope for wider reform, or the necessary adjustments of cultures? Shell offered up a perfect example this month.

The CEO of the day, Peter Voser, knew of the deal. The current CEO, Ben van Buerden, described the evidence in e-mails as “really unhelpful”, but “just pub talk.”

One might hope that if the forces of the law cannot sort out behaviour of this kind, then investors might be queuing to punish a company as wide of the ethical mark as this using their money and governance power.

Not on recent evidence from Wall Street. The social media company Snap, owner of a popular photo exchange website, went public in February with investors queuing to pour cash into it.

This despite the twenty-something co-founders specifying that investors would have zero voting rights. Far from failing, in the exodus of financial custodians that this dangerous first-of-a-kind should have been faced with, Snap raised $3.4 billion and achieved a valuation of $19.7 billion.

What a gloomy precedent this now sets for the future. It raises the prospect, in principle, of a small cadre of almost unregulated and unconstrained tech billionaires calling the shots on how the AI and robotics innovations of the next few years are deployed.

We had better all hope, if this is the way investors and regulators allow events to unfold, that said billionaires, and investors in them, are not friends of the the populist nationalist right.

Yet the way financiers were lining up to engage with Marine Le Pen as the French Presidential election neared suggests we can far from rely on this.

7. Common SecurityIf you elect nationalist demagogues, you will be more likely to experience World War III
Let me be brief on this final point.

In the Trump administration’s handling of Syria and North Korea, where is there any evidence at all of basic statesmanship?

Of rudimentary strategy even?

Of any thought that there might be lessons to be learned in decades of diplomacy?

Ahead of the election, Trump seemed to grasp the inadvisability of poking a hornets nest with a stick, let alone many millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles. “Again, to our very foolish leader”, he tweeted at Obama (all in capital letters), “do not attack Syria – if you do many very bad things will happen.”

Suffice it to say that one particularly bad knee-jerk reaction from Trump and/or those he turns into his adversaries, and all bets are off on the balance of play I endeavour to summarise above.

A message for my senior grandson, if he made it this far in this blog. Sorry fella, I have been trying for a quarter century. But I and all the people like me have pretty much failed, to date. Hopefully there is some comfort in the thought that we are still trying.

Image above: A family of apes spends some moments with a man. Still frame from 2011 video below.

Once and a while I just screw around on YouTube and find something that is for me compelling. By that I don't mean such categories as "Supertanker Disasters" of "World's Biggest Tsunamis"... although I have seen a share of those.

What I did find was friendly contact between wild gorillas and humans. It's not all poaching and hunting and eating them. It seems that a human can have a relationship with our cousins if we are willing to submit to their will.Below are two examples:

Image above: The government has also spent more than $1.5 billion collecting radioactive soil and earth from the Fukushima area, which now sits in thousands of industrial-sized black plastic bags stacked five high on several sites. Sill frame from Part I video below.

Martin Stanford, host of ‘Insight’ Radiation Alert — a nuclear scientist tells us the cleanup at Japan’s Fukushima plant could take 100 years… The decommissioning process has barely begun… A British nuclear scientist who’s just come back from Fukushima has told this program it could take up to 100 years.

1:15 in – Dana Lewis, senior correspondent: In three years Tokyo will host the Summer Olympics, and ironically one of the commercial slogans asks ‘Is Japan cool?’

It would almost be funny if the situation wasn’t so serious. 150 miles from Tokyo is the Fukushima nuclear power station where the situation is not cool — it’s a super-heated atomic catastrophe ever since a powerful earthquake rattled Japan in 2011 a 15-metre tsunami engulfed Fukushima and caused three reactors to melt down and they still are.

1:45 in – Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear: It’s unknown where those cores are at… There is some possibility that it’s burrowed completely through the containment, and is sitting in groundwater.

2:30 in – Lewis: Deep inside Fukushima there is a molten mess… But exactly how deep are those cores? And that is a burning question. These close-up photographs show that it has burned through some of the containment structure and burrowed deep in the foundation of the reactor.

Until those cores can be retrieved, the radiation will keep spewing into groundwater and leaking — no one knows for sure where… Neil Hyatt is a professor of nuclear materials chemistry. [He's] back from touring Fukushima — well at least the storage areas… and he admits the situation will haunt Japan for generations.

3:45 in – Neil Hyatt, nuclear scientist: Somewhere between 40 and 100 years for the Fukushima cleanup and complete decommissioning is probably a reasonable estimate…

4:00 in – Lewis: But while they plan to get to those cores Tokyo Electric is struggling with a lethal radioactive dragon…

4:45 in – Hyatt: One concern is that there could be a resumption of the nuclear chain reaction…

7:00 in – Mark Whitby, engineer: This was an unprecedented accident, it was very close to being much worse than Chernobyl… It wasn’t so much the reactor cores which were melting – there was nothing they could do to to retrieve that situation.

The real problem was that one of the reactors had been recently taken offline, it had a fuel pond which was very hot, stacked with 20 years worth of fuel rods and that was beginning to boil dry… Had that fuel pond boiled, and Prime Minister Kan was very aware of this, this would have been 12 Chernobyls…